“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.” — Robert Frost
(First of two parts)
IN our lifetime, there are people we meet who make an impact in our lives.
I have been blessed to meet many such persons since my growing up years and one of them was Barbara “Tweetums” Gonzalez-Ventura, lifestyle columnist at the Philippine Star who passed on recently. She conducted writing workshops at the Sunshine Place, helping her students discover themselves through writing and teaching them the best way to share life lessons that they’ve learned.
Tweetums was an advertising executive. She was a National Book awardee and author of How Do You Know Your Pearls Are Real? On Single Parenthood and Other Ms Adventures, and We’re History!, a collection of the columns she wrote on ordinary life.
It was in one of these workshops that I got to know more about her. But even before this encounter, I had heard about her from friends and read her columns regularly. While I had tried writing columns for another paper in the 1990s, creative writing was something new then which I wanted to try, so I eagerly enrolled in one of her workshops. It was my first class in creative writing. I was so bewitched by her method that I enrolled in all her regular classes at Sunshine Place. I only stopped enrolling when she went on a leave of absence after her marriage to Atty. Loy.
Since it was a small class of 5 to 6 students, she made us write our short pieces in class using her method of clustering, or using a focusing word to activate your “right brain” that makes you creative. It gives you access to patterns hidden in your brain, strengthens your own voice and provides you with focus. Sometimes you write poetry from the center of that word, sometimes you write prose.
A focusing word triggers associations; becomes a magnet which attracts images, feelings, emotional nuances, lines from song. Sometimes you keep an attitude of playfulness and let your words spill out. We usually write this on paper as though brainstorming. My paper was always full of words that I never imagined existed in my brain. Then I felt an urge to write, which Tweetums called a shift.
At times, I did not use all the words in my cluster. What my classmates and I wrote in class, we call vignettes, our full pieces for the day. We hooked our thoughts to our beginning sentence. And thoughts flowed easily. At the end, we were asked to look at the beginning sentence then repeat a word or phrase at the end of your vignette, the dominant emotion which Tweetums called Snake Bites its Tail.
After about an hour or two, we checked our pieces (mine was always the grammar) then we read our vignettes, she listened and critiqued each of our work. We would each ask whether it conformed with her lectures or not, or if it lacked luster. Many times I rewrote it and that became my “homework.” She would give us pieces by renowned writers as “samples” to inspire us to do our own prose or poetry. I made so many mistakes but she patiently corrected them. I recall my homework in my next classes were “almost” good, so she would say. But I doubted it
